Track the Mention of Your Blog or Website with Google Alerts

I have a couple of Google Alerts set up to track the mention of GeekLad and ForeverSMS on other websites. You can do the same with the names of your blogs or websites. Tracking your names and brands is particularly useful when they are mentioned on blogs. Blog articles provide you with perfect opportunities to respond by replying with comments.

Unfortunately, there were some recent changes to Google Blog Search that makes this strategy a little more difficult. Google Blog Search now includes blogrolled links within the search results. That means if someone has blogrolled your site, every time they post a new article or page, the article or page appears in the results when you search for your name. You will also receive a Google Alert when the article is posted, because the blog has your site blogrolled.

Although the alerts now include blogroll links, all is not lost. It is possible to discern between alerts coming as a result of a blogroll and those from the direct mention of your name. When you receive an alert from a page where you’ve been blogrolled, you’ll see your blog/site name and a · symbol (that’s a bullet, not a period) separating it between other blogrolled links. Essentially, you can ignore alerts with those bullets.

Using Google Alerts to track your blog or website also helps to track inbound links to your sites. It’s a nice and simple little tool to add to your SEO toolbelt.